The Canfranc Underground Laboratory ( or LSC) is an underground scientific facility located in the former railway tunnel of

Somport Somport or Col du Somport, known also as the Aspe Pass or Canfranc Pass, (el. 1632 m.) is a mountain pass in the central Pyrenees on the border of France and Spain. Its name is derived from the Latin ''Summus portus''. It was one of the most po ...

under Monte Tobazo (

Pyrenees The Pyrenees are a mountain range straddling the border of France and Spain. They extend nearly from their union with the Cantabrian Mountains to Cap de Creus on the Mediterranean coast, reaching a maximum elevation of at the peak of Aneto. ...

) in Canfranc. The laboratory, 780 m deep and protected from cosmic radiation, is mainly devoted to study rarely occurring natural phenomena such as the interactions of

neutrino A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is an elementary particle that interacts via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small ('' -ino'') that i ...

s of cosmic origin or

dark matter In astronomy, dark matter is an invisible and hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter is implied by gravity, gravitational effects that cannot be explained by general relat ...

with

atomic nuclei The atomic nucleus is the small, dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom, discovered in 1911 by Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester based on the 1909 Geiger–Marsden gold foil experiment. Aft ...

. Access to the tunnel containing the laboratory is at the '' Estación Internacional de Canfranc'', a former international railway station in the village of

Canfranc Canfranc () is a municipality in the Aragón Valley of north-eastern Spain consisting of two villages, the original village and ''Canfranc Estación'', which developed with the establishment of Canfranc International railway station to serve rai ...

Experiments

As of 2023, the following experiments are ongoing in Canfranc: * ANAIS,

WIMP WiMP is a music streaming service available on mobile devices, tablets, network players and computers. WiMP, standing for "Wireless Music Player," was a music streaming service that emphasized high-quality audio. WiMP offered music and podcast ...

dark matter search experiment * DArT, experiment to measure the radioactive activation of argon * TREX-DM, WIMP dark matter search experiment *

NEXT NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later develope ...

, neutrinoless double beta decay experiment *

CROSS A cross is a religious symbol consisting of two Intersection (set theory), intersecting Line (geometry), lines, usually perpendicular to each other. The lines usually run vertically and horizontally. A cross of oblique lines, in the shape of t ...

, Cryogenic Rare-event Observatory with Surface Sensitivity, searching for neutrinoless double beta decay * SuperKGd (also known as SUPERK-GD or under similar names), experiment for mapping of background noise signal for the

Super-Kamiokande Super-Kamiokande (abbreviation of Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detection Experiment, also abbreviated to Super-K or SK; ) is a neutrino detector, neutrino observatory located Kamioka Observatory, under Mount Ikeno near the city of Hida, Gifu, Hida, ...

neutrino telescope in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

. There is a plan to operate the Super-Kamiokande detector with

Gadolinium Gadolinium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Gd and atomic number 64. It is a silvery-white metal when oxidation is removed. Gadolinium is a malleable and ductile rare-earth element. It reacts with atmospheric oxygen or moi ...

salt dissolved into the water-mass of the detector. This operation would introduce unknown backgrounds in the neutrino-detection process of Super-Kamiokande, and SuperK-Gd is mapping those backgrounds. * BabyIAXO, preparing the ground for the full infrastructure of the IAXO (International Axion Observatory) which is a new generation axion helioscope and its main goal is to detect axions (or other similar particles) potentially emitted by the Sun’s core in large quantities *

GOLLUM Gollum is a Tolkien's monsters, monster with a distinctive style of speech in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth. He was introduced in the 1937 Fantasy (genre), fantasy novel ''The Hobbit'', and became important in its sequel, ' ...

, underground biology experiment As of 2023, the following experiments were described as proposals: * Multicellular structure formation in response to low level background radiation, a biology experiment * Microorganisms with enhanced DNA damage repair abilities, a biology experiment * Interaction between host and pathogens under low-radiation background, a biology experiment * THE MODERN-E PROJECT, a study of wireless transmission of geotechnical data through clay rocks. Through its works, it aims to achieve a wireless monitoring system capable of operating with the measurement instrumentation commonly used for monitoring the main geotechnical parameters that are relevant for the operation of the future nuclear waste repository * CADEX, the Canfranc Axion Detection Experiment * Luria-Delbrück 2.0, studying cosmic radiation to evaluate its possible role in the mutation rate of bacteria * Bacteria in heavy water, a biology experiment * NEXT-HD, the fourth phase of the NEXT program * NaI-CGF, this proposal aims to build and commission an underground facility to grow ultra-high radiopurity NaI(Tl) scintillators * HENSA, High Efficiency Neutron-Spectrometry Array * ARQ-Qubits, aims at developing a new technology to mitigate the effects of radiation on qubits * DAMIC, Dark Matter in CCDs, a dark matter detection experiment * LU, Low-level γ spectroscopy with High Purity Germanium (HPGe) detectors, a radiopurity experimemt * CUNA, an underground nuclear astrophysics facility As of 2023, the following experiments have completed their activities in Canfranc: * ArDM, WIMP dark matter search experiment * ETSEC, preliminary study for the

Einstein Telescope Einstein Telescope (ET), is a proposed third-generation ground-based gravitational wave detector, currently under study by some institutions in the European Union. It will be able to test Einstein's general theory of relativity in strong field co ...

project * BiPo, radio-purity of materials experiment * ROSEBUD, dark matter experiment * LAGUNA, neutrino observatory study (just a study, no real experiment hardware built and no measurements of any sort took place) *

, underground biology experiment

References

External links

Home

The Canfranc Underground Astroparticle Laboratory: Experimental Program Status, Results & Prospects
presentation, Angel Morales,

University of Zaragoza The University of Zaragoza, sometimes referred to as Saragossa University () is a public university with teaching campuses and research centres spread over the three provinces of Aragon (Spain). Founded in 1542, it is one of the List of oldest u ...

Estación internacional de Canfranc. Ayuntamiento de Canfranc
{{authority control Underground laboratories Research institutes in Spain Laboratories in Spain